Pirate Bay Imposters Launch Streaming Video Site, Get Media Attention

A tipster this weekend told us about an upcoming streaming video web site by The Pirate Bay called The Pirate City. The site was apparently launched last week to commemorate the 30th birthday of one of the Pirate Bay’s admins, but was quickly pulled because “something went wrong,” and now features a note promising to return in a few days. A streaming media platform run by the Pirate Bay: That does sound like a good story. Too bad it wasn’t true.

At last check, The Pirate City’s was still down. Google’s cache is still showing a site featuring the Pirate Bay’s logo but also a web design completely different from all of the Pirate Bay’s prior projects, which tend to follow the Craig Newmark school of minimalism. To make matters worse, there are some signs indicating that the “tipster” may actually be involved in running The Pirate City.

Turns out we weren’t the only ones contacted about the site. TechCrunch ran a post today in which it stated that, “[S]treaming is right around the corner,” for The Pirate Bay, later amending the post to note that The Pirate City is “not one of the Pirate Bay’s properties.” Still, the idea of the Pirate Bay offering streaming services is now out there, and likely to spread.

A quick look at the domain registration data reveals further discrepancies. The site is hosted on a server in the UK and registered anonymously through a Russian domain registrar. Neither is typical behavior for the Pirate Bay whose admins not only own their own hosting company, but are usually very up front about their projects. All of the Pirate Bay’s known projects are registered under the real names of their administrators. Never mind the fact that the Pirate Bay has previously experimented with it’s own streaming video site called The Video Bay.

However, the stunt of getting on TechCrunch made us a little more curious, and we started to look further. Turns out that the tipster who contacted NewTeeVee (and probably TechCrunch as well) has been looking for coders for streaming video projects online. A TechCrunch commenter also noticed that The Pirate City featured a reference to an entity called “divxvidz”.

The Pirate City is currently hosted on a dedicated server, but divxvidz.com still offers access to an empty sub-directory called thepiratecity.org, suggesting that the site was originally placed on a shared hosting environment. And guess who registered divxvidz.com? Exactly, our supposed tipster.

This isn’t the first time imposters have tried to make a quick buck on sites like the Pirate Bay. There is a porn torrent site out there that touts itself as being part of the Bay’s “Moderated Network,” and Piratebay.com actually tries to get users to pay hard cash in order to get “online help and support” for BitTorrent downloads.

Some people would of course point to the irony of pirating being forced to struggle with plagiarists, but we prefer our hooks and wooden legs to be the real thing.